Existing commercial relational database management systems (RDBMS) are geared toward business applications that manipulate well-structured tabular data. However, the rapid growth of the Internet coupled with increased storage capacities has resulted in a proliferation of large, unstructured data objects (LOB) such as documents, images and video streams. A growing number of business applications combine the manipulation of structured tabular data with these LOBs. However, conventional databases have weak support for large, unstructured data objects; therefore, this type of data cannot be easily searched, manipulated, and accessed. This results in problems, such as data consistency and administration problems. Conventionally, large objects are stored as small pieces that must be retrieved and then assembled. Accordingly, there is a need for the ability to store a large object as one contiguous file that can be searched, manipulated, and accessed.